Adding value to your food

The concept of biofortification, which involves augmenting a crop’s inherent nutritional value through genetic improvement, received strong support recently from Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he released a bunch of 17 biofortified varieties of eight food crops for commercial cultivation. He deemed this technology a cost-effective means to alleviate malnutrition and boost farmers’ income. Earlier, the government’s Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) had allowed experimental field trials of genetically modified (GM) Bt-brinjal, which contains an alien gene borrowed from a non-plant source, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a soil-dwelling bacterium. The field testing of GM crops is banned since 2010. These developments

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